So, in most evolution games, ears (or ear-like organs) serve no real purpose besides cosmetic. I was thinking, “ears have a function in real life, so why not in games?” Well, why not? I recognize it is hard to express hearing in a visual way, because we hear the things we hear, not see them, and most people would think, “well, why not just have ears allow you to hear sound?”, because there is more potential than just that in hearing. I think that the character should have a free form camera, but colored sight is limited to what your eye’s can see. But, when something plays a sound around you, it shows an indicator and a bit of the area around the sound, (not in color,) and the better your hearing is, the more it displays, so you can have “blind” creatures that are still playable. I don’t know why I wrote this like it was my life story, but I got my point across, eventually.
Summary:
1. Ears allow you to hear
2. Having more than one ear allows you to know the general direction of the sound
3. When something makes a sound, it will reveal a bit of the surrounding terrain to the player if they have good enough ears
4. Playing as a “Blind” creature would be easier and a more fun play through.
5. Ears cannot reveal color
I made a similiar post once
That’s actually pretty cool, the only real difference between mine and yours is mine allows the use of hearing as a form of echolocation!
My main issue with awesome sound based sense is accessibly. People who are hard of hearing might still be able to see the reveal of where the sound is coming from, but not recognize the source of the sound. Captions could help a bit, but I think an optional setting for custom difficulties could be slowing time when a loud sound is heard so the player could read the subtitles. Same for players with bad sight, a sound based creature with a 3-d sound setup and a good narrator option could be playable (not easy, but casuals could make a custom difficultiy) without seeing the screen. I could see that being a Speedrunning category, screenless maybe? Would be fun. But for real, I love using multimedia capabilities to their fullest. I’d love to play thrive fighting with mostly just prompts from my hearing at midnight. That’d be such a unique thing.
NECROPOST
the sound settings could be adjusted to allow players to hear where each sound is coming from if they cant already
Maybe there could be a visual indicator for sounds? Many games have an option that shows you when and where sounds are coming from. Minecraft shows it as text, and PUBG displays the sounds as icons around your crosshair.
This works as a solution for the lack of accessibility for the hard of hearing, and it would be easy to adjust for organisms with better and worse hearing.
I find icons on a line to depict the aroundyouness much better and more useful then minecrafts subtitles, but thats more cause i hate minecraft’s subtitles.
Basically the idea I had in